An AVIF file (.avif) is an image saved in the AV1 Image File Format — a newer, more efficient image format that produces smaller files than JPEG or WebP at the same visual quality. It’s designed primarily for the web.
Compatibility has increased fairly rapidly, and now every current browser opens it. As do Lightroom, Photoshop, macOS Preview, and the Windows Photos app once the free AV1 Video Extension is installed. In other words, it’s safe to use. And if something won’t open one, converting to JPEG takes seconds.
It’s the format many websites now serve you without your noticing — which is why you’re suddenly seeing .avif files when you right click to save images from the web.
(For how AVIF sits alongside JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, PNG and WebP, see my guide to image file formats for photographers.)
AVIF at a glance
| AVIF | |
|---|---|
| Stands for | AV1 Image File Format (still images compressed with the AV1 video codec, stored in the HEIF container) |
| What it’s for | Web delivery of photos and graphics; smaller files, faster pages |
| Size vs JPEG / WebP | Usually noticeably smaller than both at equal quality; varies file to file |
| Opens in | Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge; macOS Preview and Windows Photos (current versions); Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Camera Raw, GIMP |
| Created by | Lightroom/Photoshop export, ImageMagick, XnConvert, BatchPhoto, ShortPixel/Imagify, Cloudflare |
| Supports | 10/12-bit color, HDR and wide gamut, transparency, animation, EXIF/IPTC/XMP metadata |
| Don’t use for | Masters or archives (keep RAW/TIFF), email, social media link previews |
If you browse the web today, you’re already looking at AVIF images — you just might not realize it.
What started as an experimental format has crossed into mainstream adoption and compatibility.
With Apple adding native support to Safari in late 2022, and Microsoft integrating it into Edge in early 2024, AVIF now has approximately 93 – 95% global browser compatibility — comparable to where WebP stood a few years ago.
It is no longer a theoretical “future” format. And it’s designed to supplant WebP, not just exist alongside it. So for web delivery of photos and graphics, it’s become the practical default choice.
The core reason it exists is to be a newer, more efficient image format for the web.1 Its compression algorithm produces significantly smaller file sizes at equivalent visual quality compared to JPEG — and better than WebP too.2
For context: WebP was Google’s earlier push for a better web image format, and it largely succeeded. WebP images are substantially smaller than JPEGs at equivalent quality and can replace both JPEG and PNG.3 AVIF goes further still, built on the more modern AV1 encoder, which is significantly more efficient than VP8 (the basis for WebP).
AVIF is backed by a coalition of the web’s biggest players, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Mozilla (i.e., Firefox), and others, and it’s designed from the ground up to be a royalty-free open standard, something that has hobbled other wannabe image formats in the past.
In practice, there are some ongoing patent disputes at the commercial level, but these have no bearing on photographers using AVIF to serve images from a website.4
How much smaller AVIF files are than JPEG or WebP is genuinely hard to pin down — it depends on image content and encoding settings.
Numbers like “50% smaller than JPEG” or “20 – 40% smaller than WebP” are frequently cited, and they can be accurate. But with carefully optimized JPEGs, the gap is often smaller. When I use JPEGMini or ShortPixel, for example, sometimes there’s barely any difference in size between the JPG and AVIF files at comparable image qualities.
Importantly, it’s worth knowing that it’s also entirely possible to end up with AVIF files larger than their JPEG equivalents, particularly with images that are already well-compressed or heavy with fine detail. In my own testing on this site, AVIF has offered worthwhile savings on average — but with significant variations from file to file depending on the detail and tones in the scene.
Browser compatibility for AVIFs
For the first few years of AVIF’s life, the biggest practical barrier was browser support. Safari held out until late 2022, Edge until January 2024. That gap has now closed — all major browsers support AVIF natively, and global compatibility sits at approximately 93 – 95%.
For a photography website in 2026, that’s more than enough. The small percentage of browsers that can’t handle AVIF are mostly older iPhones and legacy corporate systems — a negligible slice of most audiences. The standard approach is still to provide a JPEG fallback so those users see something, but for most visitors, the AVIF version will load automatically.
AVIF outside the browser: Where it still falls short
Browser support for AVIF is solid, but browsers aren’t the only thing that needs to read your image files — and outside the browser, the picture is patchier.
Social media platforms are a real sticking point. When you share a link on Facebook, for instance, Facebook’s crawler fetches the Open Graph image to generate the link preview thumbnail. If that featured image is an AVIF file, the thumbnail simply won’t appear — Facebook’s crawler doesn’t support AVIF. I’ve run into this directly: a post with an AVIF featured image shows up as a blank or broken thumbnail in the link preview, while switching the featured image to a JPEG fixes it immediately. And it’s enough of a sticking point to make me rethink using AVIF directly on my site.
Facebook isn’t alone. Most social media crawlers — the behind-the-scenes bots that generate link previews on platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others — are running older image parsing libraries that predate AVIF adoption. Even if the platform’s own user-facing browser supports AVIF just fine, the crawler that generates the preview thumbnail often doesn’t.
The practical upshot for photographers running a WordPress site: if your theme uses the featured image as the Open Graph image for social sharing, having that featured image in AVIF format will cause broken link previews on platforms that don’t support it. The safest approach is to keep your featured images — specifically the ones used as Open Graph thumbnails — in JPEG format, while using AVIF for the inline images within your posts and pages where the browser is doing the rendering. In practice, that’s pretty messy to implement, so it’s more practically a choice between the convenience of continuing to use JPG or accepting some inconveniences in using AVIF.
Email clients are similarly unreliable with AVIF. If you’re sending image-heavy emails — newsletters, client proofs — JPEG is still the safe choice.
Examples
This image is an AVIF file. If your browser supports AVIF, you should see it below.
Download links for comparison (right-click to save). All formats were generated from the same original JPEG using the standard libavif encoder at default quality settings:
How to open, view, and convert an AVIF file
To open one: any current browser will display it — drag the file into Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. On a Mac, Preview opens AVIF on macOS 13 Ventura and later; on Windows 10/11, the Photos app opens it once the free AV1 Video Extension from the Microsoft Store is installed. Lightroom Classic (13+), Photoshop (2025+), Camera Raw, Affinity, and GIMP all open it directly.
To convert one to JPEG (or PNG): open it in Preview or Photos and export/save as JPEG; or in Lightroom/Photoshop, export as usual. For batches, ImageMagick does it in one line (magick image.avif image.jpg) — see my guide to converting AVIF and WebP with ImageMagick — and XnConvert or BatchPhoto do it with a drag-and-drop interface. Going the other way (JPEG to AVIF) uses the same tools, and Lightroom exports AVIF natively.
One thing that doesn’t work: renaming the file. Changing image.avif to image.jpg only changes the label on the file — the data inside is still AV1-compressed, so anything that couldn’t read the AVIF still can’t read it, and some apps will now throw an error because the extension and the contents disagree. Converting means re-encoding the pixels, which is what Preview, Photoshop, ImageMagick and the rest are doing when you export.
Is an AVIF file safe? Yes. It’s an image format, not an executable; the usual caveats about downloading files from untrustworthy sites apply to any file type equally.
Where AVIF fits in a photography workflow
To be clear about what AVIF is not: it is not an acquisition or archival format. Raw files stay as raw files; edited masters belong in 16-bit TIFF or PSD. Even though AVIF technically supports a lossless mode, there’s no practical reason to archive master edits as AVIFs.
AVIF belongs at the very end of your pipeline: web delivery and client presentation.
- Client web galleries: Exporting Lightroom edits directly to AVIF delivers visually high-quality images at a fraction of the bandwidth, which means galleries load quickly on mobile without crushing the files.
- Portfolio sites and Core Web Vitals: Page speed is a real SEO factor. Replacing heavy portfolio JPEGs with AVIFs maintains perceptual quality while satisfying Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics more easily.
- 10-bit and HDR web delivery: AVIF supports 10-bit and 12-bit color, making it the most widely supported web format for delivering Wide Color Gamut or HDR imagery to viewers on modern Apple XDR displays or high-end OLED screens.
The practical workflow: do your heavy lifting in RAW, archive in TIFF, encode to AVIF for web output.
How to create and implement AVIF files
Software support has caught up with the format. Adobe added native AVIF export to Lightroom Classic 13.0 and Lightroom 7.0 in October 2023 — both accessible from the standard Export dialog.5 Photoshop added native AVIF support more recently, in the June 2025 release. Camera Raw also supports it. On the open-source side, GIMP has supported AVIF since 2020. For batch processing, ImageMagick handles AVIF conversion well, as does Shutter Encoder.
Implementing AVIF on a website involves two steps: creating the AVIF files and serving them conditionally with a fallback. The standard HTML approach uses the <picture> element — the AVIF source is listed first, and browsers that can’t decode it fall back to the <img> tag with a JPEG:
<picture>
<source srcset="image.avif" type="image/avif">
<img src="image.jpg" alt="Description">
</picture>For WordPress, ShortPixel Image Optimizer can generate and serve AVIF versions automatically. It’s the simplest route, though it’s a paid service and can have limitations on some server configurations (particularly NGINX). Imagify is another well-regarded option that supports both WebP and AVIF conversion.
If you’re using Cloudflare, the Cloudflare Images feature handles AVIF delivery automatically — and if you’re on a Cloudflare Business account, AVIF serving is built in.
For command-line conversion, ImageMagick handles it well, and the libavif reference encoder and cavif-rs are also available for those who want more control at the encoding level.
Things worth knowing
AVIF features
AVIF supports alpha transparency, HDR, Wide Color Gamut (WCG), monochrome, animated image sequences, and multi-layer images. It’s a royalty-free format by design — though that status is subject to ongoing patent disputes at the commercial level, as noted above. In practice this has no effect on photographers using AVIF for web delivery.
AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. The AV1 encoder was originally developed for video compression.
AVIF can replace JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP in web contexts.6
AVIF vs WebP
Because both are marketed as next-generation web formats designed to replace JPEG, AVIF and WebP are often compared directly. They belong to different technological generations, and for photographers, the differences matter.
WebP was introduced by Google over a decade ago, built on the VP8 video codec from 2010. AVIF, first specified in 2019, is built on the modern AV1 codec. That generational gap shapes their capabilities.
| Feature | WebP | AVIF |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying Codec | VP8 (2010) | AV1 (2018) |
| Color Depth | 8-bit only | 8, 10, and 12-bit (HDR & WCG support) |
| Metadata Architecture | RIFF container (EXIF/XMP/ICC) | HEIF container (EXIF/XMP/ICC + spatial/HDR data) |
| Maximum Resolution | 16,383 × 16,383 pixels | Effectively unlimited (via grid tiles) |
| Compression Efficiency | Excellent — smaller than JPEG | Superior — consistently smaller than WebP |
| Browser Support | ~96% Global | ~93–95% Global |
The most significant limitation of WebP for photographers is its 8-bit color ceiling. If you shoot in 14-bit RAW and edit for modern P3 or HDR displays, WebP simply cannot hold that data. AVIF fully supports 10-bit and 12-bit color depths, WCG, and HDR transfer characteristics — making it the only format with broad browser support that can deliver that fidelity — JPEG XL can carry it too, but Safari is the only browser that renders JXL without a flag.
On resolution: WebP has a hard ceiling of 16,383 × 16,383 pixels. AVIF works around any equivalent limitation using grid derivation — slicing large images into independently encoded tiles that are seamlessly reassembled at render, giving it effectively unlimited resolution for still imagery.
On metadata: both formats technically support EXIF, IPTC, and ICC profiles. The real-world stripping of copyright data isn’t a format limitation — it’s the behavior of the tools used to generate them, most of which strip metadata by default in pursuit of smaller files. If preserving copyright metadata matters to your workflow, you need to explicitly configure your encoder to pass it through, regardless of format.78
A note on JPEG XL
AVIF isn’t the only contender in this space. JPEG XL (JXL) has been gaining real traction in 2026: Safari has had native support since Safari 17 (September 2023), Firefox added experimental support in version 152 in June 2026, switched on from the Firefox Labs panel in Settings, and Chrome 145 (February 2026) added initial support for it, though it’s not yet enabled by default.
JPEG XL offers some technically impressive features. Perhaps the most impressive is that it can take existing JPEGs and losslessly compress them to make them roughly 20% smaller with zero pixel changes. It’s worth watching, but for now, its browser adoption is still well behind AVIF’s. For now, AVIF remains the stronger choice.
AVIF vs HEIF/HEIC
AVIF and HEIF often come up in the same sentence. HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) is the container — an empty digital box. Apple uses the HEIF container on iPhones but fills it with image data compressed using the proprietary HEVC codec, resulting in a .heic file. AVIF uses that same HEIF container but fills it with data compressed using the open-source AV1 codec. Same container, different codec, different purpose: HEIC is designed for device storage; AVIF is engineered for open web delivery.
AVIF and photography metadata
Because AVIF uses the HEIF container architecture (built on the ISO Base Media File Format), it has strong native support for EXIF, XMP, IPTC, and ICC color profiles. That means that your copyright notices and camera data can survive conversion from a master TIFF or JPEG into an AVIF.
But there’s a gotcha that’s not really about the format itself but how the tools use it. Almost every AVIF conversion tool, CDN, and WordPress optimization plugin strips all metadata by default to minimize file size. Cloudflare workers, ShortPixel, basic command-line scripts run without explicit parameters — all of them will silently wipe your copyright and IPTC data unless specifically configured not to.
If metadata preservation matters to your workflow, the fix is straightforward.
In Lightroom’s Export dialog, the Metadata dropdown controls what gets embedded — make sure it’s set to “All Metadata” rather than “Copyright Only” or “None.”
If you’re converting with ImageMagick, don’t use the -strip flag unless you actually want the metadata gone.
And whatever tool you’re using, it’s worth checking the output on a single test file before running a large batch — metadata stripping is silent and there’s no undo.
Common questions
Is AVIF better than WebP?
For quality per byte, yes — AVIF is a generation newer (AV1 vs VP8), compresses better, and supports 10/12-bit color and HDR, which WebP can’t. WebP has slightly broader support in older software and social crawlers. More detail in the AVIF vs WebP section above and in my WebP explainer.
Is AVIF better than JPEG?
Smaller at the same visual quality, with more features — for web delivery. JPEG still wins for universality: email, print labs, older devices, and any place you don’t control the viewer.
Can I email an AVIF image?
Technically yes, but many email clients won’t display it. Send JPEG.
Does Lightroom export AVIF?
Yes — Lightroom Classic 13.0 and Lightroom 7.0 (October 2023) and later offer AVIF in the Export dialog. Check the Metadata setting if you want copyright and IPTC data preserved.
AVIF specification
The official AVIF specification is available here.
Notes & References:
- As a technical matter, AVIF is a specification for compressing still images and animated image sequences with the AV1 codec and storing them in the HEIF container format. [↩︎]
- In most usage, AVIF uses lossy compression. It does support lossless compression, but the practical utility of that for web delivery is limited. [↩︎]
- JPEGs are traditionally best for photos. PNGs are often better for graphics, illustrations, and logos. WebP attempts to replace both. [↩︎]
- The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) designed AV1 as a royalty-free codec, but a Luxembourg-based patent licensing company called Sisvel operates an active AV1 patent pool, and in March 2026 Dolby filed suit against Snap Inc. over AV1 patents. These disputes are relevant to commercial platform operators — streaming services, device manufacturers — not to individual website operators. [↩︎]
- Wikipedia, “AVIF,” citing Adobe Lightroom 7.0 and Lightroom Classic 13 release notes, October 2023. [↩︎]
- The practical approach is to serve AVIF to supporting browsers while maintaining JPEG fallbacks for legacy browsers via the
<picture>element. [↩︎] - See the metadata guide for how to handle this. [↩︎]
- As AVIF becomes the dominant web format, the same aggressive metadata stripping that’s common with WebP will follow. [↩︎]
